About us

I have been trying to understand why people behave the way they do for most of my life. As a kid in the early 1980s, I remember crouching under a school desk during nuclear drills and wondering why adults could hate each other enough that children had to practice for the end of the world. Around the same time, my family hosted Saudi college students in our California home. At ten years old, I didn't have the vocabulary to make much sense of the profound cultural and religious differences I was encountering; I simply knew that their world was very different from mine. The experience stayed with me. Years later, September 11 made those questions much more urgent. My reaction was essentially: Who did this, and what had happened between us that made them willing to invest this much time, planning, and resources into hurting us? I didn't want to understand in order to excuse it. I wanted to understand because I wanted to become an active part of whatever the solution was. That impulse eventually took me to Cairo, graduate school in security policy, and a career in global security.

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Over the next two decades, I became increasingly convinced that we were setting the bar far too low for what international engagement could accomplish. We spent enormous amounts of money bringing talented people together, delivering training, transferring expertise, and building partnerships, yet too often counted the interaction itself as the win. I wanted to know what happened next. Could people actually use what they learned? Did their institutions have the authority, leadership, resources, and internal processes to support them? Were the people who could make change possible even part of the conversation? And did we really understand what our partners wanted and needed, or had everyone settled for the safest, easiest thing we could agree to do? I saw tremendous possibility being left on the table, not because people weren't capable or committed, but because we weren't doing enough of the hard, practical work around the engagement itself: understanding the whole system, bringing the right people into it, allowing competing perspectives to be tested rather than avoided, identifying what stood in the way of implementation, and designing programs around what could realistically be absorbed, applied, and sustained.

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That's why I started Coalescion. Our vision, a world where humanity not only survives, but thrives, is ambitious, but our approach to achieving that is deliberately practical. We want people to leave a training able to use what they learned; institutions to become stronger because their people participated; governments and partners to understand one another well enough to find where their interests can reinforce each other; and good ideas to have a fighting chance of becoming actual practice. We don't expect everyone to agree, and we don't pretend every problem has a win-win solution. But we do believe we can get much better at working across our differences, building trust without requiring sameness, and creating relationships and systems capable of producing something better than the lowest common denominator everyone was willing to settle for. That matters far beyond the success of any one program. 

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Human beings are extraordinarily capable, but our ability to cooperate has not kept pace with the complexity of the problems we've created and inherited. We are more connected than ever, yet increasingly fractured, and the consequences of getting this wrong are becoming harder to contain. 

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“Good enough” is no longer good enough. We have to get better at working with one another, at turning what we know into what we do, and at building systems that allow more people to flourish without requiring someone else to lose. 

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And that's exactly what we're working to do, one Coalescion at a time.

Shawn C. Baker-Garcia
Founder & CEO